Interstellar

I’m a sci-fi fan from a long time ago, long before Star Trek or Star Wars or nearly all of the dystopian novels and movies that came out since 1960. I’ve read everything written science-fictionally about time travel and the relativity of time and worm holes and black holes and the search for habitable planets. And I’ve seen nearly all the sci-fi movies ever made. Well, it all came together in Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. Well, maybe not all coming together. There were still a bunch of worm-hole questions that never got answered. But the visuals were spectacular with the scenes aboard the docking station that took them to the worm hole and the smaller exploratory craft that took them down to the surface of the planets they visited

, and the gargantuan tsunami wave that overtook them on the first planet they visited to the frozen planet where they found the enigmatic Dr. Mann (Matt Damon). But first, the plot. Earth is dying in horrendous dust storms and failing crops, and mankind will probably not survive beyond the present generation. Coop (Matthew McConaughey) is an ex-spaceship pilot for NASA, now a farmer living with his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and his son and daughter. Through a rather unexplained discovery, he goes with daughter Murph to see what could be causing unexplained gravitational anomalies. And, lo and behold, they stumble onto a secret fenced compound housing a NASA complex, with scientists attempting to save the human race with a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A entails sending a spaceship up to a wormhole near Saturn, then going through to an alternate universe where other expeditions have gone to find a human-habitable planet, and then to return to possibly transport the remnants of the human race to that planet. Hmm. It was never explained very well just how the folks on earth were going to be saved and transported. Which leads to Plan B. On this expeditionary spaceship, the scientists were transporting thousands of fertilized human eggs cryogenically suspended for the trip, eggs which would ensure the survival of the human race, but not of the human race back on earth still surviving on corn and dust. Coop is given the assignment to fly the ship along with Dr. Brady (Ann Hathaway) and two others as well as the robot known as TARS.

The rest of the plot, as you can imagine, could go in endless possible directions. And it does. And it leaves most of us very confused by all this scientific talk about gravity and its influence on time, and worm holes and black holes. Despite all the inconsistences and incongruities and unanswered questions, this is a movie well worth seeing. It may have been unnecessarily long (167 minutes) and the musical score may have been too loud and intrusive (especially when they were going through the worm hole), and Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) may have leaned a bit too heavily on Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Still, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, and Gravity, this film will endure as a stepping stone into the future.